Edited by

Photographed by

Music by

Cabiria's eyebrows are straight, black horizontal lines,
sketched above her eyes like a cartoon character's. Her shrug, her walk, her
way of making a face, all suggest a performance. Of course a prostitute is
always acting in one way or another, but Cabiria seems to have a character in
mind--perhaps Chaplin's Little Tramp, with a touch of Lucille Ball, who must
have been on Italian TV in the 1950s. It's as if Cabiria thinks she can waltz
untouched through the horrors of her world, if she shields herself with a comic
persona.

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Or perhaps this actually is Cabiria and not a performance:
Perhaps she is a waiflike innocent, a saint among the sinners. It is one of the
pleasures of Giulietta Masina's performance that the guard never comes down. As
artificial as Cabiria's behavior sometimes seems, it always seems her own, and
this little woman carries herself proudly through the gutters of Rome.

“Nights of Cabiria,” directed by Masina's husband, Federico
Fellini, in 1957, won her the best actress award at Cannes, and the film won
the Oscar for best foreign picture--his second in a row, after “La Strada” in 1956
(he also won for “8 1/2” in 1963 and “Amarcord” in 1974). Strange, then, that
it is one of Fellini's least-known works--so unfamiliar that he was able to
recycle a lot of the same underlying material in “La Dolce Vita” only three
years later.

Now the movie has been re-released in a restored 35-mm. print,
with retranslated, bolder subtitles giving a better idea of the dialogue by
Pier Paolo Pasolini. There is also a 7 1/2-minute scene that was suppressed in
earlier versions of the film.

Seeing it in its new glory, with a score by Fellini's beloved
composer Nina Rota, “Nights of Cabiria” plays like a plucky collaboration on an
adult theme between Fellini and Chaplin. Masina deliberately based her Cabiria
on the Little Tramp, I think--most obviously with some business with an
umbrella, and a struggle with the curtains in a nightclub. But while Chaplin's
character inhabited a world of stock villains and happy endings, Cabiria
survives at the low end of Rome's prostitution trade. When she's picked up by a
famous actor and he asks her if she works the Via Veneto, the center of Rome's
glitz, she replies matter-of-factly that, no, she prefers the Archeological
Passage, because she can commute there on the subway.

Cabiria is a working girl. Not a sentimentalized one, as in “Sweet
Charity,” the Broadway musical and movie based on this story, but a tough
cookie who climbs into truck cabs, gets in fights and hides in the bushes
during police raids. She's proud to own her own house--a tiny shack in an
industrial wasteland--and she dreams of sooner or later finding true romance,
but her taste in men is dangerous, it's so trusting; the movie opens with her
current lover and pimp stealing her purse and shoving her into the river to
drown.

By the nature of their work prostitutes can find themselves
almost anywhere in a city, in almost any circle, on a given night. She's
admitted to the nightclub, for example, under the sponsorship of the movie star
(Alberto Lazzari). He picks her up after a fight with his fiancee, takes her to
his palatial villa, and then hides her in the bathroom when the fiancee turns
up unexpectedly (Cabiria spends the night with his dog). Later, seeking some
kind of redemption, she joins another girl and a pimp on a visit to a reputed
appearance by the Virgin Mary. And in the scene cut from the movie, she
accompanies a good samaritan as he visits the homeless with food and gifts (she
is shocked to see a once-beautiful hooker crawl from a hole in the ground).

All of these scenes are echoed in one way or another in “La
Dolce Vita,” which sees some of the same terrain through the eyes of a gossip
columnist (Marcello Mastroianni) instead of a prostitute. In both films, a
hooker peeps through a door as a would-be client makes love with his mistress.
Both have nightclub scenes opening with exotic ethnic dancers. Both have a
bogus appearance by the Virgin. Both have a musical sequence set in an outdoor
nightclub. And both have, as almost all Fellini movies have, a buxom slattern,
a stone house by the sea, a procession and a scaffold seen outlined against the
dawn. These must be personal touchstones of his imagination.

Fellini was a poet of words and music. He never recorded the
dialogue at the time he shot his films. Like most Italian directors, he dubbed
the words in later. On his sets, he played music during almost every scene, and
you can sense in most Fellini movies a certain sway in the way the characters
walk: Even the background extras seem to be hearing the same rhythm. Cabiria
hears it, but often walks in counterpoint, as if to her own melody. She is a
stubborn sentimentalist who cannot believe the man she loved--the man she would
do anything for--would try to drown her for 40,000 lira. (“They'd do it for
5,000,” her neighbor assures her.)

She is a woman seeking redemption, a woman who works as a sinner
but seeks inner spirituality. One night she happens into a performance by a
hypnotist, is called onstage, and in the film's most extraordinary sequence is
placed in a trance (half vaudeville, half enchanted fantasy) in which she
reveals her trust and sweetness. She also informs the rude audience that she
has a house and a bank account.

A man named Oscar (Francois Perier) sees her on the stage and
begins to court her with flowers and quiet sincerity. He is touched by her
innocence and goodness, he says, and she believes him. At last she has found a
man she can trust, to spend her whole life with. She is filled with joy, even
as her friends (and we in the audience) despair of her naivete.

Fellini's roots as a filmmaker are in the postwar Italian
Neorealist movement (he worked for Rossellini on “Open City” in 1945), and his
early films have a grittiness that is gradually replaced by the dazzling
phantasms of the later ones. “Nights of Cabiria” is transitional; it points
toward the visual freedom of “La Dolce Vita” while still remaining attentive to
the real world of postwar Rome. The scene involving the good samaritan provides
a framework to show people living in city caves and under bridges, but even
more touching is the scene where Cabiria turns over the keys of her house to
the large and desperately poor family that has purchased it.

These scenes provide an anchor, an undertow, that lends a
context to the lighter scenes, like the one where she is mocked by two Via
Veneto prostitutes who are more elegant (and much taller) than she is. Or the
scene where she drives away in the actor's big American car while flaunting her
new client to her rival prostitutes (again, a scene Fellini would recycle in “La
Dolce Vita”). In all of those scenes she remains in defiant character, and then
we sense a certain softening toward the end. As she allows herself to believe
that her future lies with Oscar, her eyebrows subtly soften their bold
horizontal slashes, and begin to curve above eyes and a face that seem more
vulnerable. It's all in preparation for the film's unforgettable last shot, in
which we see Cabiria's face in all its indomitable resolve.

Of all his characters, Fellini once said, Cabiria was the only
one he was still worried about. In 1992, when Fellini was given an honorary
career Oscar, he looked down from the podium to Masina sitting in the front row
and told her not to cry. The camera cut to her face, showing her smiling
bravely through her tears, and there was Cabiria.

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